Okay, thank you all for joining us for this morning's update on FY23 trading update and our cost initiatives which have been released to the ASX this morning. You are joining us this morning. This meeting is hosted from Meanjin land, and we thank the traditional owners of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples and recognize our elders past, present, and emerging. This morning you'll be hearing from our Group CEO, Don Meij, our Group Chief Financial Officer, Richard Coney, our APAC CEO, Josh Kilimnik, and our Europe CEO, André ten Wolde. You will be able to ask questions in the Q&A. For those people, for compliance purposes, who cannot ask questions via Q&A on Zoom, I can please encourage you to send an email to investor.relations@dominos.com.au, and I will endeavor to answer your questions as quickly as possible. Thank you all, and I will hand over to our Group CEO and Managing Director, Mr. Don Meij. Thank you, Nathan, and thank you for everybody who's come on this important call this morning. So today we wanted to update the market on, first of all, our trading, but equally as important, some significant initiatives that we're implementing imminently in the business. You know, when we wake up today, we're four markets larger than we were just two years ago, and our network's 50% larger by store count than we were pre-COVID. And the question we keep asking ourselves is, how do we get the leverage and the benefit of this global reach? In many cases, the business has acquired businesses with all sorts of different software. We may have duplication roles and tasks. And so how do we improve the efficiencies of the business? Because one of the things that we're constantly aware of in our own model called High-Volume Mentality is that we constantly preach that all inefficiency in a business ultimately gets passed back through to a customer, a franchisee, or a shareholder. So how do we lighten the business, make sure that we're agile and that we're as most efficient as we can possibly be? So if you come with me onto slide two, we're going to talk about four specific initiatives that we're announcing today. The first of those initiatives is that we're initiating the process to exit the Danish market, and I'm going to explain in more detail about the history of Denmark and our decision today. We're also going to be optimizing our corporate store network of roughly 913 stores, and we'll be more specific on that in the next pages. We will be closing the commissaries that still remain in the APAC region in the current financial year that's about to start, in the 24 financial year. That was always the strategy. We're just bringing the clarity to that today in all of this announcement because we've done all the work and we know the numbers, and we're also retiring some digital assets that are part of the old digital platforms. As shareholders know, we launched our next generation of apps and web in the last financial year, and there's old engines that have still been connected that we're retiring in the coming year, and then we're going to talk about how we're streamlining our core operations to deliver some operational efficiencies with the scale of our network. If we just look at the financial year FY24, we expect to be able to deliver somewhere around about an EBIT improvement of around AUD 25 million-AUD 30 million to the network. Now, with these savings, about a third of those at one point will be passed back to franchisees, and these are hitting the business on an annualized basis. If we go to the bigger picture over the two years on an annualized basis, so recurring profits, we hope to be able to deliver or expect to be able to deliver somewhere between AUD 53 million to AUD 59 million dollars in savings. So if you come with me onto the next slide, slide three, which brings the picture together, there'll be roughly non-recurring costs in the region of AUD 80 million-AUD 93 million. That's, you know, we've obviously, on one end, looking at how leases play out and how different the projects play out, and that's the sort of range we expect. Then there's the savings. You can see roughly AUD 12 million in Denmark, AUD 16-20 million in optimizing our corporate store network, AUD 5-7 million in the commissary closures and the improvement to our unit economics and retiring the legacy IT assets. Now, that's AUD 5-7 million that hits in EBIT into the network. On top of that, there's still a few extra million that will go into savings, into our advertising funds to improve our advertising because some of these digital assets are recovered through our ad funds globally. There'll be approximately AUD 20 million in streamlined operations. At our full year announcement, the full restructure of our business will be announced at the full year, and it will become more clear on the timing of that AUD 20 million. If we come now on to slide four, sorry, five, I just want to bring some of the history again to the Danish market. You know, back in 2019, we acquired the Danish business. It had been closed at that point. Unfortunately, it had been brand damaged through some food safety issues. We thought we'd acquired it at a good price at the time for EUR 2.5 million, and based on our previous record, we thought that we'd be able to turn that market. Hindsight's a wonderful thing. Clearly, the business was a lot more, it was brand damaged, and it took us a lot longer to get the recovery we were expecting. As we take an honest look at the business today, when we consider the losses and the journey to profit, it's just not something that we think is going to deliver a fair return. And as a result, we've commenced the process to exit the Danish business. I want to make it really clear. We're very proud of the execution for the team that we're working in Denmark. Considering it was a brand damaged business from food safety issues and so on, we only ever got perfect scores in all of our stores from the different local councils in Denmark. Quite a high achievement. We delivered at some of the highest expectations in operational excellence through our service times, through our customer ratings, and we even made significant progress on the brand, but it just wasn't enough progress, and we couldn't get the right pricing for our products. And hence, we're making this decision today. So for the next financial year, we expect to be able to save roughly AUD 12 million in EBIT to improve our earnings. If you come with me onto slide six and optimizing our corporate store network, this is largely in two baskets. The first basket is that there will be roughly 60%-70% in store closures, roughly 2% of our network. These stores have been identified as stores into three different camps. One could be that somewhere along the history, the rent became structurally an issue. So maybe there was a reset in that region, and when we look at the rent today, we think it's just uncommercial for that location. A second one could be that when we acquired businesses in Europe, that we may have had stores just where there were two brands, and we kept them both trading as Domino's, and they're just right on top of each other. In fact, one specific case, we're literally a block from each other, and we just think that it's more commercial that one of those stores should close. And the third area may have been that we did a carve-out of a territory, and we thought the house count in that area would grow to a point, and it may not have. So it's been an over-carve-out. So in the APAC region, we would expect the stores that are affected in that area will be imminent. So we'll try to get them done by 30th of June. In Europe, there's legislation we need to work our way through with team members and landlords, so there will be some months of delay to get the European stores through. The second part of this announcement today is adjusting the price of some of our stores where, you know, we often make a profit on the sale of stores. In this case, we will be reducing the price of the store, potentially giving it some subsidies and getting it into the hands of a franchisee in a profitable and viable case to make sure that where we are, that we're consolidating our best team members and to get the best results out of our existing store network. So when you look at both those two initiatives, there's roughly AUD 50 million-AUD 55 million non-recurring anticipated costs that we'll be taking up in the next few months. And then they will be delivering AUD 16 million-AUD 20 million worth of savings in this coming year, but it's annualized from the point of either closure or sale. If we can then come on to slide seven, you know, we've talked about the back-of-house dough model today. Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Germany, and largely Japan have been on a back-of-house model, and it's been delivering some great quality execution and profitability to the unit economics. When we acquired the Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Cambodia business, we announced that we would be also implementing back-of-house in those markets. We've actually executed against that in Cambodia and Taiwan already in the last couple of months, and Malaysia and Singapore will take place in the financial year 2024 so that the whole of the APAC region will be back-of-house. And then we're also, as I mentioned earlier, retiring some of the engines that powered the old digital system. Now, some of those are still current, but they will be retired as they get replaced with the new platforms that the consumer can see today. Roughly AUD 5-7 million to improve to our EBIT. And then on top of that, there is another few million dollars that improves in the ad funds. Obviously, that's not straight to earnings, but it does make our spendable media more effective in the markets where that applies. And then finally, the initiative number four on the next slide, streamlining our corporation. You know, we talked a little bit about this when we acquired the markets. We also talked about this in February that there was a review taking place in the business where we've got many variations of software from HR system to finance systems to operational systems that we've been looking to consolidate. There's, you know, we operate in some of the most expensive markets in the world that we've been wanting to move to more shared services to benchmark against some of our peers in retail and in like-for-like businesses. One of the benefits of Malaysia has been that that was the intent. And so we've been in a process where we will be able to announce a new structure of the business in August, but because we already have a pretty good indication of those savings and knowing the materiality, then we're announcing them today. Not all of them will be impacted in August or September or benefited because some of this movement into shared services and so on does take a little bit of time. We talk about the annualized savings that will be achieved from the point of those actions. All of that, as I mentioned, will deliver somewhere between AUD 53 million and AUD 59 million, and at some point, around a third of that would be applied back to the franchise network as we're achieving it. If we now just go to our trading update today, I'd like to share that our group same-store sales for the half are currently running at 0.2% and in the last quarter at 2%. If we just isolate out Taiwan, because Taiwan up until October was still running under COVID conditions, that would be 1% and 3%. Just to highlight that, you know, in the rest of the network, we're starting to see some momentum versus the first quarter. We believe we're going to have 6%-7% of new stores open, excluding any of the store closures. We do highlight that we're not likely to achieve the 8%-10% store count next year, which is our medium-term outlook, but we're still highly confident when we look at our run rate that we'll get to the 7,100 stores that we've given as an outlook for 2033. We also want to highlight that we're sharing today that the underlying EBIT is expected that we haven't improved against the first half. So H2 EBIT growth has not improved against the H1 performance. So we just want to highlight that again today. So at this point in time, I've got all of the team members, including Josh, Andre and Richard, and even Nathan to answer any questions. So I'll hand back over to Nathan. Thank you. Thanks so much. I didn't notice anyone, Nathan, so I'm sure people remember. For those that are not unmuting themselves, then there'll be a donation to our registered charity Give for Good. Okay, so let's get stuck into that. The first question from Bank of America, Don, is: Do these cost initiatives announced today suggest that initiatives to offset higher costs through pricing have not been as successful as hoped? Yeah, it's true that it's taken us longer to deliver upon our pricing, and I look forward to going through all the detail of the August announcement. But yes, we now, you can see where the same-store sales are starting to pick up, and various markets are now into a healthy momentum, but it did take us a little longer to pass that through. Thank you. Now, just a question in terms of just getting clarity, and a couple of people have asked just regarding the footnote that we've included. You just mentioned, Don, in terms of H2 EBIT growth, and should we read that as tracking towards that -21% in the second half? Yes, that's correct. Okay, thank you. Now, I'm just going to a number of questions, and I'm going to start moving through them. A question from Richard Barwick: In which countries will those 70-75 corporate stores be closed? Yeah, just by the sheer number of scale, it's predominantly Australia, Japan, France, and Germany. Because we've got landlords and team members in a European process, we haven't broken them out specifically because there's legal obligations there and how we've got to go through this process. Rather than go through the deduction by individual market, which could be complicated, I can share it's predominantly in the four major markets today. Then plus Denmark is on top of that. Are covenant levels being, a few people have asked as well, are covenant levels being tested in either FY23 or FY24 given underlying EBITDA run rate? And how close to three times leverage are you comfortable with? I'll hand over to Richard on that one. Yeah, no, basically we do anticipate our net leverage ratio to be in the higher end of our range of our covenants. However, we will be working to sort of bring them back over time to the two times with prudent capital management, and you know, even these initiatives are going to improve our profitability, you know, in the medium to short to medium term. So we'll be watching it closely, but obviously managing our capital in all cases across the balance sheet. A couple of questions about the underlying health of the franchisee network. So, and I'll answer them, I'll ask in order, but what is the risk that more store closure will be required, either corporate stores or franchise stores? Yeah, so the criteria that we've applied here is the same criteria we'd apply to any store. So if a franchisee was in a viable store that had proper rent that we thought was commercial, had the commercial sales and the commercial house count, if a franchisee came to us and said, "Look, you know, I'd like to close my store," we would most likely buy that store or it would sell into the market. If there was a structural test for the exact same reasons that we've talked about today, then that could be a store closure. We have tested the network from our analysis, and we do not expect any material movement from store closures from what we're announcing today. So we've literally been looking across the system, and as it turns out, many of these stores that we're closing today, these corporate stores are the ones that we've already inherited back from franchisees for those three reasons. And so no, we do not expect to see any material change from the numbers we're announcing today. And in fact, we'll be growing store network again currently and into next year. Just in terms of franchisee profitability, has it continued to deteriorate or has there been an improvement since the last time we reported? It's variable by market, and we will break that out. So in some markets, it may have dropped slightly. In other markets, there's been improvement, and that's all been tied pretty similar to our own earnings. So you can see our, you know, the first quarter versus the current quarter. So where we're seeing good rebound in the current quarter, we're seeing earnings respond. If we're still, you know, in a couple of markets where we're just on the initiatives that have been applied in the other businesses, then franchisee health would be similar to our own health in those markets. Two questions from different analysts here, and sorry, I'm not getting everybody's names as I'm rushing through these because there's a lot of questions I want to get to, but why will that profitability not get worse given that you've walked away from some of the pricing action you've taken? For example, I'm assuming that's from Michael alluding to the delivery service fee. And also, can you maybe give an update on some of those initiatives that you're doing to rebuild delivery volumes? Yeah, so that's a really good question. You know, an example for any Australian shareholder, they would have seen that we removed the Domino's Service Fee last week. I can confidently tell you that our food and labor were exactly in line with the food and labor at its best trend in recent weeks because of adjustments we made in other parts of our pricing. Because with the recovery of delivery, recovery of delivery when you've had a slight decline in deliveries, you get the yield of economy of drivers that, you know, are more productive, and a delivery order carries a better food cost. So it's still early days as that's an example, but that's been the case in other parts of our business. Like we did this in Japan a number of months ago, and we can see great recovery in the Japan business right now in order count growth and so on. So the, you know, why it's taken a little longer is we talked about pricing needs to be tested over longer windows. We shared that in February, and in many cases, we had to make rapid decisions where we didn't do the testing. What's been very different about since February is there's been much longer periods of testing, hence why DSF was only unwound last week, because there were long tests going on in other parts of our business, like our corporate stores. And we want to make sure the longevity of reversing that, making some other adjustments to our pricing, getting a better delivery growth in those markets, and then what was the net net of that. And then we made the decision to go through with initiatives like that. So yes, feeling good about the global product development pipeline, which is part of this, feeling good that we're a lot more informed about our pricing and we're seeing the health of that in the current quarter. And then, you know, noting also that the stores that close here, nearly in every single case, the sales get picked up by the neighboring stores because they're often on top of each other, as I said, or there's a structural rent area that could be relocated or something like that. So yeah, I hope that answers that question. In terms of cost of goods, inflation, any point at which we're going to get some COGS relief? Yeah, we are seeing, and it is a different story between Europe and APAC, but we are seeing COGS relief already, and we'll see more savings in July in the APAC region. Europe's variable. There's some that, and maybe Andre, you can add a little bit of color, but we've seen energy costs coming down. So energy and soft commodities have been coming down. Andre, any other color to add to Europe? Yeah, you're right. Energy has come down, but there's still some pressure on flour, pressure on cardboard. And we're seeing things coming off, but not to the extent that it is material to our food cost, but we are hopeful for the next six months of this year that it will come down further. Whereas in APAC, Josh. Yeah, APAC, we've seen a bit of movement in electricity prices. Obviously, gas hasn't moved much at all. We're seeing sort of other commodities come off. Wheat and cheese are certainly coming off the other side, and we're hoping for good movement there in relation to our business. A little bit of movement in chicken, but beef is slowly coming off from what we can tell. So yeah, it's not like it was this time last year where we weren't sure where the next rise was going to come from. Certainly steadying and normal flow of business for us right now. Two of our biggest commodities are cheese and wheat. That's assisting the APAC region. Just in terms of the reinvestment back in the franchisee base, Don, Tom Kierath has asked, is the AUD 25 million-AUD 30 million if combined, are they combined savings and net or a gross number that is the amount DMP shareholders will see? So is that before the reinvestment? Also Richard Barwick has asked that beyond those savings in FY 2024, will a third of the savings beyond FY 2024 also be reinvested? Yeah, so the best way to look at it is that was a gross. So the net will be minus the one third, and it's all timing. When do they happen and then what initiatives do you pass a third through? So there'll be some lag in some of that or liquid in applying that to each market. And yeah, so if you look at, if you said pick a halfway point at something like AUD 55 million, and when it's being annualized, roughly a third of that would go back through whatever that is, AUD 18 million, whatever, back to franchisees, and the rest would hit our shareholders' return. Thank you. So in terms of, obviously you just mentioned again that AUD 55 million figure, in terms of the AUD 25 million-AUD 30 million in FY24 savings, obviously you've got Denmark, and then where do you see, this is a question from Bryan Raymond, what are the initiatives that will then result in the FY24 savings? Yeah, so I hope I got that question right, but you can imagine there's bills. So the stuff we do immediately, and that just hits straight away, first of July, we've got real genuine savings that's being passed through into our business. And then there's the initiatives where you've still got leases, you've still got the process we've got to go through in Europe, and you've got some restructuring of the overhead with shared service and so on, and that just takes time. So the more we get through the FY 2024 year, it's the annualized results post that when that initiative hits. So there will be clearly initiatives hitting in the second half that you don't get the full year savings from. It's the next year that you see the saving, and hence why we said FY 2025. Run rate to the network basically picked two thirds of that AUD 55 number from the 2025 year onwards. There are a few questions just in terms of the same store sales trading update, and I'm going to aggregate them into one. I think Shaun Cousins has done a summary here. Can you outline? Well, firstly, a few questions I've asked. Can you provide some context in terms of the same store sales growth, how much of that has come from volume versus ticket? And then I'll dig into some of the other questions. Yeah, all of that is ticket. So in most of our businesses, not all, but most of our business, we were slightly negative or negative on our customer counts, and that the outcome of that 2% or 3%, whichever way you want to pick it, has come from ticket at this point. Same-store sales growth, the plans to grow same-store sales growth, Flex is not silver bullet, was originally indicated in H1, and price trust appears to have been lost with core customers. How will this be done of growing same-store sales without losing, without harming DMP EBIT margins further? And what are the incremental improvements in franchisee profitability that will then drive store growth? Yeah, where we see the marriage of price and product, we're seeing really good results. I mean, we've just finally executed all of that playbook in Germany, and where Flex is working, it took its time to tweak and retweak through the business. So we've got components of the German pricing, which is Flex, and then with new product as an example, we see a really good marriage. We're seeing that in Japan, the Benelux, particularly the Netherlands, has performed very, very well for a long period of time. We've even seen really good green shoots in France. We're in amongst all that product launch right now. Shareholders will see it all in Australia, literally in a week's time. Similar playbook to what's being played in Japan and what's being played in Europe. I do have a question in terms of, and I'll answer it straight up. There was a question in terms of the split between underperforming corporate stores that will close and the others that will turn around. From our media release, approximately 65-70 of these underperforming stores will close, and 70-75 stores DMP will partner with experienced franchisees to accelerate that refranchising. A question here, are any of the stores to be closed loss-making? Are the cost savings identified net for future gains on sale, or is that additional profit of sale all gone for those closing stores? Yeah, that's a good question. All of those stores are loss-making, hence why they're part of closure. They're one of those three structural issues that we talked about. Typically, if we could see a horizon of a reasonable enough return, we would say, hang in there because why would you write down that asset? So that's one part of that number. The second part of that number is discounting part of the portfolio to sell a store at a more effective price to make it viable for an incoming franchisee. So yeah, that's the two pieces to that announcement in the second bullet point. Is the accelerated amortization in legacy IT assets part of the one-off costs? Yes, it is. That's correct. And is DMP franchisees receiving a third of the cost savings sufficient to drive store growth? Yes, we believe it is. In fact, to franchisees today, that will be a lovely announcement. And already I've been receiving emails all morning, you know, congratulating and thanking the company on making these sort of decisions. So that's my first wave of messages that I've received, but I do expect that will be received well by franchisees. That we're, you know, practicing what we preach with high-volume mentality in that we've got to be the most efficient to be the most competitive in any market and to be the best value. You need to be the most efficient. And in some of our structure, based on some of our historical decisions, we haven't been as efficient as we could be. That's what we're changing today. You haven't provided FY 2023 EBIT guidance. What are the remaining uncertainties that make you reluctant to provide guidance this late in the year? And also, can you give some color as to regional performance in the EBIT? What's driven this downgrade? Yeah, so today, because there's so many moving pieces here with leases and when the timing for Denmark, and there's so many bits and pieces, you know, you can imagine the projects to pull this together in our business to today. And so, yep, that's largely why we're sharing what we're sharing. I think we've been relatively clear in sharing that the underlying H2 EBIT growth has not improved on the H1. So somebody asked a good question about that earlier, and that's quite accurate. A couple of questions on Denmark, the number of stores, which is 27 stores in Denmark, the sales in Denmark and also the aggregated losses over the past four years in Denmark. Yeah, the disappointing thing for the team when we've made this call is they've had really good sales momentum this year, but those sales have not been profitable enough. We were not able to get the price we needed for our product based on the damage that had happened. The team did an extraordinary job on, you know, customers that were rejectors of Domino's based on the damage that had been done by their predecessors, but we just couldn't get there fast enough. And we're aware we're in a public environment and the return is not fair enough. And so don't put a drag on the business where we're at. I don't have the aggregated number. Richard, that's something we can disclose before you. What was the aggregated? Or you might have it? We haven't disclosed it before, Don, and so we'd have to consider that. Disclosed it before. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Okay, so in terms of the sale price on corporate stores, will that be on normal terms or are the franchisees being incentivized to buy those stores given the stores are still in turnaround? Yeah, so there'll be some incentives. So yes, as we often do with these stores, as we make sure we're handing over in a profitable and viable state. So yes, some of those stores will include incentives. That is correct. That is built into all of these numbers, by the way. So that's not an additional drag. In fact, those stores will often enhance the profitability, not taken into account on that equation. I'm not sure if Andre, Josh, want to add anything to that? Yeah, the big part of that incentive is obviously a lower price for them to get the store. And that's what we've calculated in here, as little as possible ongoing incentives, but at a really fair price to get their hands on a store. Yeah, same for APAC. Exactly the same way we're looking at this. I actually, when I think about the future, I think it's actually going to create some of our really strong leaders without these high debts. So I'm quite excited about what we're doing here. That comment in terms of that net benefit, Don, answers the next part of Michael Simotas' question, but he also asked, will you make any losses on store sale? Yes, that is absolutely correct. We will make losses. That's how this number comes about. That's losses on the sale of that portfolio of stores. That's correct. A question here in terms of the fortressing model. And previously you highlighted increasing stores was not cannibalizing your own footprint. However, you're now closing some stores that are near to each other. Can you clarify that? Yeah, I think it's a good question. You know, when you think of the scale and size of growth, I mean, look at Japan, it's opened 700 stores in the last nine years. And you know, a few of them, we said we've got for history, whatever happened, rent might have changed, encroach might have changed. But this is a really small number relative to any of our peer group over the life of a network. So yeah, for the three reasons we mentioned earlier, might have been through the acquisition that they were just too close to each other. Could have been a rent restructure, or it could be that we just forecast more store growth, store count growth in that area than we achieved. So yeah, the carve-out strategy has been significantly successful for this business, and we've proven that year after year after year. This is a small adjustment for that, but two other pretty important reasons. Are all markets, excluding Denmark, profitable, including Cambodia? All markets are profitable, yes, with Cambodia's nine stores. So once you put all the overhead against Cambodia right now, it's very small. It's tiny. But the store units are profitable in Cambodia. But yes, all other markets are profitable today. Alexander Mees asked, non-recurring costs, will they all be provided for in the FY 2023 P&L? I can answer that, Alex. That's not the case. I think we've answered that some of these benefits will accrue. And what is the cash versus non-cash split of the non-recurring cost, please? Yeah, the clear majority is non-cash. But Richard, did you have a split on that approximately? Yeah, I mean, obviously in terms of the store piece, that's relatively, you know, non-cash. It's just a write-down of our asset portfolio. Denmark is majority non-cash, but obviously we've got some closed-down actual costs in terms of concluding leases and things like that. We'd say the majority. And the commissary closures, yeah, maybe again, I'd say 50-50 on that piece. So the majority would be non-cash. And then the final piece, which we haven't sort of estimated yet, will be the sort of streamlining of operations that is likely to have some would be majority cash, but we haven't got close to that number yet. We'll be talking about that in the August results. Two questions from [Elaine Miller.] The first, how do you expect to get store rollout when closing stores? Although [Elaine] mentions this question might have been cut off, it says, and have only how do you expect to get store rollout when closing stores and have only been able to open one? On our investor website, it has that new stores opened financial year to date are 165. But I think, Don, the broader question in terms of how do you expect store rollout to happen? [Elaine's] follow-up question is DMP ex-growth, given that now we're in cost out, not growing stores? Yeah, definitely not ex-growth. I think we tried to highlight that in the press release today. I think you've got to put this on the relativity of the scale to what franchisees see amongst this. When you break it down by market, these are small numbers. And of those, there'll be beneficiaries or franchise or corporate that will pick up those sales. So yeah, I think we've got to keep it all in a reality check that this is that they're not making an overreaction to the size of this number. It's a small number of stores. We still have an immense amount of greenfield territory throughout our network, and hence why we're still reconfirming our 10-year outlook to 2033 of 7,100 stores. We can pressure test that all day long. We materially underservice France, Germany, you know, the new markets in Malaysia, Singapore, and parts of Japan, as an example, and Taiwan. Greenfield stores are just sitting there waiting, you know, for us to be able to execute against them. Yeah, I think it's really, really important to put this all in reality check. Anybody referencing against other of our QSR peers, these are still very low numbers over a 10-year window of what we've closed. In transparency, I've had some analysts ask some follow-ups on that I believe we've clearly enough answered some of these questions, so I'm going to give us another go at them. Ben Gilbert, can you give us some color on regional EBIT performance? We haven't broken out the EBIT performance in this result today, but we will be in the full year, obviously. So yeah, I'm not sure what else I can answer to that. And we didn't get into this. This isn't a full year announcement or a, you know, this is just a market update of where we are today. And largely because of these four big initiatives that they've been signed off and they're material. So therefore, they do have an effect on shareholders and our franchisees. So that was the leading part of this announcement today. Because otherwise, we're within, aside, you know, our legal obligations and expectations of the market. But we've also got feedback in February. Make sure you keep shareholders fully informed all the way through. No surprises. And that's what we're doing today. And then a follow-up question again on the balance sheet question. Given the continued earnings decline and the weak momentum into FY 2024 and cash, you'll need to outlay. Michael Simotas suggested it looks like there's a good chance you'll breach debt covenants in the first half. Will you raise equity, reduce dividend, or seek covenant relief? Yeah, we don't believe we will at this point. You've got to remember that that covenant is against underlying. And yeah, I mean, you see an immediate improvement because a lot of this isn't cash. Especially in this first few months, you just see the immediate improvement to the store's bottom line, to our network bottom line, removing a drag on the business. So at this stage, all of our modeling and so on, we don't believe that we're going to need to raise any capital and that we're going to show some nice returns to shareholders. Richard Barwick, can I ask you, are you assessing closing stores on an ongoing basis rather than in a group like this today? Yeah, we should. You know, these three criteria we're just reinforcing today. That will be, you know, a trickle of what 2s or 3s when rent becomes unsustainable. The acquisitions, we're not going through. Well, if we went for an acquisition again, we should analyze that more carefully to some of those on top of each other. Yeah, we're very conscious of looking at that carve-out. But on a bigger scheme of things, I think let's be careful of overplaying this as 2% of the network and look at it over time and, you know, it's a trickle. Craig, will you walk us through the timeline of the future long-term store targets changing as a result of the news today? Craig, Don had earlier said that that outlook, and it's on one of our slides. The outlook of 7,100 stores by 2033 has been unchanged. Alexander Mees asked, "We've noticed you've removed the delivery service fee. How has that decision been received? And are you confident higher order counts can offset the DSF?" Yes, we've already did it a number of months ago in Japan. We had elements of it in Germany and Australia. We just did some long testing. So through the long testing, we could see some good order count recovery. And so yeah, from a national perspective, first week, it met all of our expectations. And actually, in our two biggest variable costs, it exceeded our expectations in the first one or two weeks. Because we always think there's legacy coupons before the new coupons. But I think we did such a good job with the execution because we had enough planning and timing that one week, but it looked really good from what we promised franchisees. And Don, you mentioned earlier that all of that same store sales growth had come from ticket. Richard Barwick, given weak SSS growth, despite material price growth, volumes must be in material decline. Is it fair observation? And if so, what does it say about underlying health of the category and all the brand? Yeah, if you average the group, materially and aggregate-wide, yes, there is customer count decline in the last half. But as I highlighted earlier, where we've seen product price mix properly, we're already seeing customer count growth and same store sales. But in fairness, it's this quarter where we're seeing that. And it's building each week to week right now. So yeah, it's not material when you do the average of the group. Questions from Sam Teeger from Citi and Lisa Deng. How do we see competition from Pizza Hut given new owners? Sam similarly asked, what are expectations of how the competitive landscape changes in Australia following the change in ownership of your primary competitor? Yeah, it's a really good question. One of the things that I can share with shareholders today as per, you know, public reports that you can draw upon with CREST, NPD, and credit card data and so on is that we've maintained a 51% market share. There has been, and you're talking specifically about Australia, there has been a decline in independents and small chains. And Pizza Hut's been a benefit of gaining share from the small, you know, the alternative to Domino's customer. We mostly share customers with the big QSRs of McDonald's, KFC, Subway, and Hungry Jack's. We share very few customers, which may be surprising to most with Pizza Hut. Like any new owners, I mean, it takes time for you to appreciate what changes they might bring. What it doesn't deter us from is our plan. You know, what we've always done very well is focus on where we can see the puck moving with customers. And we've said this over a number of years, our growth is more dependent on stealing share from other parts of other QSR categories. We're talking specifically about Australia here. In other parts of the world, there's so much pizza to grab, especially in Europe, that that's not a relevant comment. But yeah, you know, still every second pizza consumed in Australia, more than every second pizza in Australia is a Domino's pizza. We've held that share in our last couple of years. And in fact, if you go pre-COVID, that's a lot ahead. I mean, we were 47 or 46 coming into COVID. So we've gained share in that window. In the most recent window, we've held share. The decline in categories comes from independents and other small chains, CREST and Capers and those sort of businesses. Does the rising store level EBITDA targets need to be revisited given rising interest rates and debt service costs for franchisees that have gearing? Sorry, I was in one train of thought there. Sorry, Nathan, say that again. My apologies. Do the EBITDA targets for stores need to be lifted given the rising cost of servicing debt for franchisees that have gearing? Yeah, we talk often about inside the business, we often talk about, you know, the average weekly unit sales targets of franchisees consider that they need to be higher than they were, you know, two years ago. So we talk about AWUS targets. We talk about, you know, still shooting for that three-year payback. And yes, so inside the business, we do communicate that quite transparently with our franchisees. Yes. A question from Michael Simotas. Can you please talk about the dispersion of franchisee profitability? How many lose money? There was also a question from Sam Haddad. Which region has the longest tail of underperforming franchisees? Yeah, so like we have in recent years, we'll disclose a lot of the full year. We'll break that out as we have in recent times. So it's in a like-for-like moment because, you know, there's always a challenge when you break pieces out at different times. So I think we've provided a record amount of transparency in that area in recent years and we'll continue to do so at the full year. The reinvestment back into the franchisee base. Lisa Deng has asked if you can outline how we're going to be investing that third into franchisees. Where does that and how does it look like? Yeah, typically that will come back in the form of a food rebate to the franchisee. So that's typically that or it could be a royalty subsidy. But they're the two bigger triggers. Do we need to be opening the network to franchisees out of the system to drive rollout? Preferably not. We've talked a lot about this extensively. We've got a really solid body of talented franchisees. We still have ambitions to increase the averages per franchisee, both for the efficiency of the franchisee and for our network. So our preference, you know, ultimately there will be people that will enter the system that are buying from other franchisees, but it's not our focus. Our focus is to grow from within. If we look at all of our franchisees, the clear majority of them are absolutely dominated by people that have grown up in this business as, you know, pizza maker or delivery driver to manager to franchisee. It's one of the great Domino's stories that we're very proud of. Two questions from Ben Gilbert. First one was, what does today's update mean for overheads given the level of incentives that we'd previously advised were expected to accrue? Not sure what we referred to in the past with incentives that we accrued. I think we previously referenced the fact that some of the short-term and long-term incentives had been rolled back. But I think Ben, probably to further your question, I mean, the Project Foundation work, the streamlining the business probably answers that question in terms of the material changes that we're looking to make to the overhead. Yeah, I think it's healthy for our network, and we've often had this question from analysts and shareholders. It's healthy for our network when we're making these sort of savings that we also pass some of that through to the unit economics to make the unit economics, whether it's corporate or franchise, you know, help them thrive. You know, if you make an announcement like this and there's not any sharing in a partnership, I don't think that reflects well on our values as a business and what we try to do in a partnership with our franchisees. As I mentioned earlier, I've only received positive emails this morning directly from franchisees congratulating us so far. Whether that changes over the next few days, I don't know. But yeah, I think this is a positive and healthy announcement both for our network and for the operating efficiency of this business. The follow-up question from Ben was, can you give some thoughts on trends into the first half of 2024? Why should the market not annualize the second half of 2023 into the first half of 2024, including M&A and cost out? Are you seeing any tailwinds ex the 2% comp? Yeah, so that's a very good question, Ben. So in the first half of last year, we were declaring that we were taking a lot of one-off hits in pain with soft commodities largely. You know, we would have business partners walk in the room and say, here's the new wheat price, here's the new, you know, protein prices and whatever, and we just had to take the hit because franchisees already had retail prices in the marketplace. You've got a business partner who's saying, if you want supply to keep your net, you know, you've got to pay this new price. And we were the meat and the sandwich in amongst that. That is not currently happening. So the first half last year, we were experiencing a lot of that. It was also the first wave where we were trying to take some of that price and we made some decisions that didn't play out. So when we look at the business right now, definitely a lot more educated on price and we're seeing the benefits of that. A lot of the hard work into the new products that are rolling out in the market. We've had some really impressive products that have actually had record penetrations, like our Crispy Fries in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and now rolling in Germany, the most successful side item in the history of those markets. The My Domino's Box that we launched in Japan and Taiwan, the highest penetration of new customers we've ever had, which is going after the single leader in QSR. That now product's just been rolled in Malaysia and launches next week in Australia and New Zealand and so on. So we, yeah, we feel really good about the product announcement, the profitability building of those products. Our pricing models are a lot more tested and a much better place, and we're going to have less one-off hits. So even in a baseline before we make these improvements, our internal forecasting is growth. And then this blows on top of that. The last question from Ben: will you be looking to review capital allocation and return hurdles that would appear DPE has seen no benefit from COVID and in fact has gone backwards? My apologies that first part of that question. Sorry, Nathan, I'm not in the right way. Yeah, will you be reviewing the return hurdles or capital allocation given that DPE appears to have gone backwards since pre-COVID? That is a very good question, Richard. I'm not sure if you could answer that. I mean, we continually review our capital return hurdles. Obviously, we'll be taking a harder look in terms of capital allocation. And we're, you know, as you can imagine, we're making these types of decisions, then we really are looking at how do we optimize the returns across everything. And that'll be IT initiatives that will be investments in new markets. Where are we going to get the best returns in terms of allocation of capital? But we've always done that. But we'll probably be more in focus at the moment. Thank you. A couple of questions I might throw over to Josh on this one. Is there anything specific about the store size in Southeast Asia that forces a dough to be centrally made to begin with? And will the store footprint be an impediment to making dough in store? Quite the opposite, actually. I mean, if you look at Cambodia, we've already closed down that commissary there. So we actually see it as probably the thing that will accelerate growth, if anything, because we're not hamstrung by the tyranny of distance from the commissary, you know, from a truck point of view. It appears we've lost Josh at this stage. I'm going to have to go and fetch live dough to the sites. We've also swapped one. I can answer some of that. I'll use my power to mute Josh. Sorry, Josh. Yeah. So yeah, markets like Cambodia and so on, it's actually, you know, it's been fantastic because you're a smaller market, Singapore as well. The cost of a commissary versus the scale of those businesses, it really leverages well. Sorry about that. Okay. So moving back to a question from Lisa Deng, the European franchisees will be seeing a profit crunch in FY24 as we increase food prices. How do we think about the impact of that? No, we're not increasing food prices in 2024. I'm not sure if that—no, that's a—sorry, we're confused. Andre, you can clarify. No, no, no, no. On average, we're not seeing it coming down. That's what our point was earlier tonight or your morning. It's sort of leveled out, and we're not seeing what Australia is seeing, that it's coming down as a total basket. We expect that later this year, but not currently. So it's not going up at this moment. Question from Richard with the investment of corporate stores to high-performing franchisees. Is there a danger some franchisees may get too big, and what's your policy on the size of franchisees? Yeah, we don't have that risk of scale of our franchisees today. Our biggest franchisees, we have a franchisee in Australia with 23 stores. We have a franchisee in Europe that's approaching on 40 stores. But so these are still, you know, relatively modest numbers compared to our peers globally. So, you know, we're still shooting for that five average in the nearer term and 10 over the longer term average per store. So that hasn't changed in our vision of how we want to operate the business. In terms of same-store sales growth, do you believe that you can achieve same-store sales growth in FY 2024 within your medium-term target range? Yes, we do. We've got a pretty poor 2022 to roll that many of those things we've structurally fixed. A question from Shaun Cousins. Do the 4,000 stores by the end of the calendar year 2023 and 5,000 by the end of the calendar year 2026 store milestones still hold given the closures announced today and reduced organic growth in FY 2024? Obviously, we've spoken about the 2033 targets. I think we've committed to an update on the outlook at the full year, but I'm not sure if you can add any more color there. Yeah. So those numbers, again, I think, yeah, we are going to have a slight miss on that first target. Yes. Oh, lost you, Nathan. That's into the cherry. That's going to cost me. Are we using aggregators in all of our global markets? Yes, we are using aggregators in all markets. Yes. The minimum wage increase that's recently been announced, what steps are we taking to offset the pressure from minimum wage increases? Yeah, no, it's a really good question. So we've been preparing for that, and it came literally right in the mid-range of what we thought it would. And so there's a number of initiatives. One is food's coming down in July. Two, there's profitable products that are being launched that run a much better margin, and they're launching in June as we speak. And then the third thing is just the order count growth from delivery that just gets a leverage of that, you know, we lost last year. So there are three big core initiatives. There's lots of little initiatives of different pieces. But yeah, order count growth, which we're seeing in improvement, new products, and food savings that hit on the 1st of July. So franchisees will benefit. But franchisees in 2024 in Australia could enjoy some of the lowest food they've enjoyed in years from a percentage of sales. How's franchisee payback period in ANZ, Japan, Europe looking right now and looking into FY 2024 given the comments you made earlier about franchisee profitability? And how can the experienced franchisee owners expect a better turnaround than DMP-owned corporate stores? Yeah, so we'll disclose all of that breakdown as I mentioned earlier. I know that question's been asked, and so it's better for a like for like that we announced out of the full year, so apologize that we're not breaking down in pieces right now. When we sell a store to a franchisee, we will set it up to succeed. So what we've highlighted here is we're reducing the price of that store. In some cases, we may also give a rebate of a royalty or a food rebate. So we'll set it up for success. It is, in that case, you know, not a structurally broken store. I mean, I talked last week in our business about three stores in our history, which, you know, at some point somebody said we're unsuccessful. Kalgoorlie, biggest store in DPE today. There was a point in our history when someone said, "You can't operate a store in Kalgoorlie." It's our biggest store. You know, a store in Brisbane and Cleveland was doing 20% of the sales it did last week only, you know, seven or eight years ago. Another store in New Zealand, I'll give you an example. So there's lots and lots of these examples where setting it up, if it's not structurally broken from a rent and a sub-commercial house count, or when we merged a few brands that were on top of each other, everything still sticks that, you know, if it's set up for success, let's reinforce that in the price and any support if we need to to make it a success. Andre, can you just advise whether you've now passed through the commodity increases in Europe that we hadn't initially been able to pass through? Yes, for the, yeah, yes, we have. And should we expect any additional integration costs in Southeast Asia? There's potentially, if I jump in, there's potentially still some IT integration costs that we were planning. And I'll let Josh jump over the top of that. But that was sort of in the plan. Yeah, that's just part of, you know, us launching our online assets in there. So NextGen, which is our platform, as we retire the GOLO, which is part of the US, we're actually changing that out. We're putting. There's a few little ones in Taiwan where we change our point of sale over so that we're all on the same platform. These are all things that will actually help us leverage long-term than anything else. So yeah, a few little integration costs there. These are all planned. All planned. All part of our business plan. Yeah, exactly. And then the final question from Peter Gregory. Can you comment on the structure of the market? For example, do you expect that increasing cost of living there will be a trend towards more Domino's product versus higher-cost dining options? Yeah, that's what we've seen, you know, both in our peers, and you've seen some of their announcement in the last few months, and you've seen QSR as a whole. So yeah, we do, you know, we look at all the product development and what we're rolling out. We've got some really lovely, sharp price points that are really good products that bring good margin to our franchisees. Yeah, that's, you know, in all of our new product development programs that we talk about, we're talking about making sure that we've got products perfectly designed for the next two years. You know, we remember back to 2008 when we launched the Chocolate Lava Cake for AUD 2.95, and it was just a rockstar. People came to us and bought pizza to get the Lava Cake. You know, there's a number of those sort of initiatives where we look at products with really good price points, highly desirable, that will make sure that we're front and center in the conversation, competing against burgers, fried chicken, and sandwiches. Okay. Well, we have answered all of the questions that have been put in front of us this morning. So perhaps, Don, if I just hand it to you for any final comments before we close out the session today. Yes, thank you, everybody. Thank you for coming on the call and for all of your questions. You know, we believe that we're, as an announcement of today, we're making the business far more efficient, both for ourselves, for our shareholders, being able to make sure we're really competitive for our customers and making our business more efficient for our franchisees. We're looking forward to more disclosure of the detail, particularly on that project number four in the business around the, you know, right-sizing of our team and so on for the efficiency of the business. I look forward to talking to you all then. Thank you. Thank you all.